“I say, Henry, you’ve got yourself another stripe!” Alistair Tudsbury, swelling in green gabardine, leaning on a cane, his moustached face purpler than before around the nose and on the cheeks, beamed down at him through thick glasses.
“Hello there, Tudsbury!”
“Why aren’t you in Berlin, old cock? And how’s that magnificent wife of yours?”
As he spoke, a small black British car pulled up to the entrance in the streaming rain and honked. “That’s Pamela. What are you doing now? Why not come along with us? There’s a little reception at the British embassy, just cocktails and such. You’ll meet some chaps you ought to know.”
“I haven’t been asked.”
“You just have been. What’s the matter, don’t you like Pam? There she sits. Come along now.” Tudsbury propelled Henry by the elbow out into the rain.
“Of course I like Pamela,” Henry managed to say as the father opened the car door and thrust him in.
“Pam. look who I bagged outside the press room!”
“Why, how wonderful!” She took a hand off the wheel and clasped Pug’s, smiling familiarly as though not a week had passed since their parting in Berlin. A small diamond sparkled on her left hand, which before had been bare of rings. “Tell me about your family,” she said as she drove out of the White House grounds, raising her voice over the slap of the wipers and the drumming of the rain. “Is your wife well? And what happened to that boy of yours who was caught in Poland? Is he safe?”
“My wife’s fine, and so’s Byron. Did I mention to you the name of the girl he travelled with to Poland?”
“I don’t believe you did.”
“It’s Natalie Jastrow.”
“Natalie! Natalie
“Knows you, she says.”
Pamela gave Henry a quizzical little glance. “Oh, yes. She was visiting a chap in your embassy in Warsaw, I should think. Leslie Slote.”
“Exactly. She went to see this fellow Slote. Now she and my son intend to get married. Or so they say.”
“Oh? Bless me. Well, Natalie’s quite a girl,” said Pamela, looking straight ahead.
“How do you mean that?”
“I mean she’s extraordinary. Intelligence, looks.” Pamela paused. “Willpower.”
“A handful, you mean,” Pug said, remembering that Tudsbury had used the word to describe Pamela.
“She’s lovely, actually. And ten times more organized than I’ll ever be.”
“Leslie Slote’s coming to this party,” Tudsbury said.
“I know,” Pamela said. “Phil Rule told me.”
The conversation died there, in a sudden cold quiet. When the traffic halted at the next red light, Pamela shyly reached out two fingers to touch the shoulder board of Henry’s white uniform. “What does one call you now? Commodore?”
“Captain, captain,” boomed Tudsbury from the rear seat. “Four American stripes. Anybody knows that. And mind your protocol. This man’s becoming the Colonel House of this war.”
“Oh, sure,” Pug said. “An embassy paper-shuffler, you mean. The lowest form of animal life. Or vegetable, more exactly.”
Pamela drove skillfully through the swarming traffic of Connecticut and Massachusetts Avenues. As they came to the embassy, the rain was dwindling. Late sunlight shafted under the black clouds, lighting up the pink banks of blooming rhododendron, the line of wet automobiles, and the stream of guests mounting the steps. Pamela’s streaking arrival and skidding halt drew glares from several Washington policemen, but nothing more.
“Well, well, sunshine after the storm,” said Tudsbury.
“A good omen for poor old England, eh? What’s the news, Henry? Did you hear anything special at the White House? Jerry is really riding hell for leather to the sea, isn’t he? The teletype says he’s knocked the French Ninth Army apart. I do think he’s going to cut the Allied line right in two. I told you in Berlin that the French wouldn’t fight.”
“They’re supposed to be counterattacking around Soissons,” Pug said.
Tudsbury made a skeptical face. As they went inside and fell into the long reception line extending up a majestic stairway, he said, “The bizarre thing to me is the lack of noise over Germany’s invasion of Belgium and Holland. The world just yawns. This shows how far we’ve regressed in twenty-five years. Why, in the last war the rape of Belgium was an earth-shaking outrage. One now starts by assuming total infamy and barbarity in the Germans. That gives them quite an edge, you know. Our side doesn’t have that freedom of action in the least.”
At the head of the wide red-carpeted stairs, the guest of honor, a skinny, ruddy man of fifty or so, in a perfectly cut double-breasted black suit with huge lapels, stood with the ambassador, shaking people’s hands under a large painting of the King and Queen, and now and then nervously touching his wavy blond hair.
“How are you, Pam? Hullo there, Talky,” he said.
“Lord Burne-Wilke, Captain Victor Henry,” Tudsbury said. Pamela walked on, disappearing into the crowd.
Duncan Burne-Wilke offered Pug a delicate-looking but hard hand, smoothing his hair with the other.
“Burne-Wilke is here to try to scare up any old useless aeroplanes you happen to have lying around,” said Tudsbury.
“Yes, best prices offered,” said the ruddy man, briefly smiling at the American, then shaking hands with somebody else.
Tudsbury limped with Pug through two large smoky reception rooms, introducing him to many people. In the second room, couples shuffled in a corner to the thin music of three musicians. The women at the party were elegantly clad, some were beautiful: men and women alike appeared merry. It struck Victor Henry as an incongruous scene, considering the war news. He said so to Tudsbury.
“Ah well, Henry, pulling long faces won’t kill any Germans, you know. Making friends with the Americans may. Where’s Pam? Let’s sit for a moment, I’ve been on my feet for hours.”
They came upon Pamela drinking at a large round table with Leslie Slote and Natalie Jastrow. Natalie wore the same black suit; so far as Pug knew she had come to Washington in the clothes she stood up in, with no luggage but a blue leather sack. She gave him a haggard smile, saying, “Small world.”
Pamela said to her father, “Governor, this is Natalie Jastrow. The girl who went tootling around Poland with Captain Henry’s son.”
Slote said, rising and shaking hands with Tudsbury, “Talky, you may be the man to settle the argument. What do you think the chances are that Italy will jump into the war now?”
“It’s too soon. Mussolini will wait until France has all but stopped twitching. Why do you ask?”
Natalie said, “I’ve got an old uncle in Siena, and somebody should go and fetch him out. There’s nobody in the family but me to do it.”
Slote said, “And I tell you, Aaron Jastrow’s quite capable of getting himself out.”
“Aaron Jastrow?” said Tudsbury with an inquisitive lilt. “
“Will you dance with me?” Pamela said to Pug, jumping up.
“Why, sure.” Knowing how much she disliked dancing, he was puzzled, but he took her hand and they made their way through the jam toward the musicians.
She said as he took her in his arms, “Thanks. Phil Rule was coming to the table. I’ve had enough of him.”
“Who is Phil Rule?”
“Oh — he was the man in my life for a long time. Far too long. I met him in Paris. He was rooming with Leslie Slote. He’d been at Oxford when Leslie was a Rhodes Scholar. Phil’s a correspondent, and an excellent one, but a monster. They’re much alike, a pair of regular rips.”
“Really? Slote’s the brainy quiet type, I thought.”
Pamela’s thin lips twisted in a smile. “Don’t you know they can be the worst? They have pressure-cooker souls, those fellows.” They danced in silence for a while; she was as clumsy as ever. She spoke up cheerily. “I’m
